This Mesmerizing Map Of The Internet Lets You Explore The Web's Tiny Connections

Web traffic companies like Alexa do a good job of showing the
relative ranking of websites, but what about the connections
between websites? What do those look like?

The Internet Map is an
online project that seeks to visualize metrics like web traffic
and linking between sites, and the result is a beautiful
landscape of the web today.

Here's how a website's physical shape and placement on The
Internet Map was determined.

Mathematically speaking, The Internet map is a
bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the
Internet. Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is
determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic,
the bigger the circle. Users' switching between websites forms
links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to
arrange themselves to each other.

Right now, The Internet Map includes over 350,000 website
from 196 countries, with each circle corresponding the color
assigned to that particular website's country.

In the US, it's no surprise that Google, Facebook, Twitter,
Yahoo, and Wikipedia rank among the largest, but the real fun
starts once you zoom in and explore the neighboring websites
nearby.